r/NixOS • u/garrrage • 2d ago

Sound went KAPUT on upgrade! ...Old GPU?

I recently upgraded my NixOS system (on unstable) to find all sound/audio missing. I'm using a desktop system with speakers and pipewire. Pwvucontrol (and qpwgraph) only show "dummy output". Rolling back does fix it, but this is not a long-term solution. Alsamixer looks like this both on rollback and upgrade.

Running sudo lspci -nnk | grep -A3 -i audio yields no output, which leads me to think my sound card is no longer being recognized. Granted that doesn't print anything on rollback, either.

This is where I'm a little unfamiliar with how computer hardware handles audio. Do GPUs handle audio? (I don't think they do.) I have an old GPU: an AMD Radeon RX 550 / 550 Series from 2017.

Running sudo dmesg -Tx | grep ERROR yields:

kern :err : [Wed Sep 30 08:29:55 2026] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: amdgpu: [drm] *ERROR* Unsupported screen format RA24 little-endian (0x34324152)

several times. But is "screen format" relevant in this situation? We're talking audio.

If anyone has any ideas or further bread-and-butter audio commands to run, I'd love to hear them.

1 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

1

u/Justinsaccount 1d ago

I'm a little unfamiliar with how computer hardware handles audio

Everyone else is a lot unfamiliar with how YOUR computer plays audio.

You appear to have 3 audio devices

  1. a logitech usb webcam - likely only a microphone
  2. the HDMI output on your GPU
  3. the Intel audio on your motherboard

Where do you expect your sound to come out of? Your monitor? Speakers plugged into your motherboard?

What does wpctl status output?

Does the cards tab in pwvucontrol show nothing? You can figure out if it's a kernel driver thing or a pw thing by going through things like aplay -L and speaker-test -t sine -f 300 -D each:device:from:aplay:here (do not recommend running it without arguments)